Das Wien[n]erische Diarium: A digital data treasury for the humanities

CC-BY 4.0, Sandra Lehecka

Since its foundation in 1703, the Wien[n]erisches Diarium (today: Wiener Zeitung) has been archived continually and is fully available as a body of sources. Facilitating its use in a digital environment is of great scholarly interest to a number of disciplines within the humanities: media history, art history, music history, literary studies, ceremonial studies, onomastics, and historical linguistics are just some of the fields that may benefit from the collection. This go!digital project therefore proposes to work closely with researchers from all these fields in order to determine joint priorities and aspects of particular relevance in preparing the sources for digital use.

In the course of this project, a few hundred issues of the Wien[n]erisches Diarium – published over the course of the 18th century – will be digitized in their entirety. In spring 2017, an electronic call for nominations, which was promoted via digital channels and published in the print version of the Wiener Zeitung, provided an opportunity for scholars of various disciplines, to nominate specific issues or sets of issues for the shortlist.

A review of the nominations received has shown how broad a spectrum of topics they cover: From births and baptisms, birthdays and Saint’s days, coronations and hereditary hommages for crowned sovereigns, to deaths, funerals, executions and catastrophes. Other events covered in the issues recommended are religious and secular festivities, announcements, openings and inaugurations as well as famous guests’ visits to the capital. Coverage of notable achievements in the broadest sense of the word – such as the Declaration of Human Rights or the beginning of aviation – have likewise been included in the selection, as has the immanent topic of publishing in the Wien[n]erisches Diarium (Wiener Zeitung).

A number of additions which the project team ended up making were therefore not so much due to a necessity to complete the thematic range, but aimed at closing up larger temporal gaps. In order to be able to accurately and thoroughly document the Wien[n]erisches Diarium (Wiener Zeitung) in a continuous, chronological manner, the project team ultimately decided to include five representative issues from each year (as far as they had been digitized by ANNO). Taking into account the development of the Wien[n]erisches Diarium (Wiener Zeitung) into a newspaper in the modern sense, it was attempted to create a reference corpus that showcases the turns and upheavals of a period of radical political, social, scientific and artistic change in the 18th century.

The ‘reporting tool’ below provides information about the selected issues and allows users to track the project’s daily progress online: